Yazidi lawmaker Mahma Khalil, who is in touch with Yazidis sheltering on Sinjar mountain, said the aid was insufficient.
“We hear through the media there is American help, but there is nothing on the ground,” he told Reuters in Baghdad. “Please save us! SOS! save us!” he said several times. “Our people are in the desert. They are exposed to a genocide.”
He estimated 250,000 Yazidis were seeking shelter on the arid mountain, which the community considers the holy site where Noah’s ark settled after the biblical flood. Other estimates put the number of Yazidi refugees in the tens of thousands.
Obama, who brought U.S. troops home from Iraq to fulfil a campaign pledge, insisted he would not commit ground forces and had no intention of letting the United States “get dragged into fighting another war in Iraq”.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians have also fled for their lives after Islamic State fighters overran their hometown of Qaraqosh on Thursday. Numerous Christian denominations have lived in northern Iraq since long before the arrival of Islam.
A United Nations humanitarian spokesman said some 200,000 people fleeing the Islamists’ advance had reached the town of Dohuk on the Tigris River in Iraqi Kurdistan and nearby areas of Nineveh province. Tens of thousands had fled further north to the Turkish border, Turkish officials said.
Doubts in Washington
Questions were quickly raised in Washington about whether selective U.S. attacks on militant positions and humanitarian airdrops would be enough to shift the balance on the battlefield against the Islamist forces.
“I completely support humanitarian aid as well as the use of air power,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted after Obama’s announcement. “However the actions announced tonight will not turn the tide of battle.”
The Kurdish regional government insisted on Thursday its forces were advancing and would “defeat the terrorists”, urging people to stay calm. Local authorities cut off social media in what one official said was an attempt to stop rumors spreading and prevent panic.
The mood in Arbil on Friday was calm but apprehensive. One resident said some residents had returned home after initially leaving the regional capital in fear of the Islamists’ advance.
“Two days ago, people left the city if they had homes in the villages and went there. Now people’s state of mind has improved and those who left have returned,” said Omaid, a 37-year-old dentist on his way to the market.
Residents were stockpiling food and weapons, he said.
Faced with deep Congressional and public reluctance, Obama backed away from using air power against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria last year after chemical weapons were used. Assad has since regained the upper hand against divided opposition forces in a three-year-old civil war.
However, the president said preventing a humanitarian catastrophe and averting a threat to American lives and interests in Iraqi Kurdistan were ample justification for the use of U.S. military force in Iraq.
Seeking to keep pressure on Maliki, Obama insisted on the need for an Iraqi government that “represents the legitimate interests of all Iraqis” to reverse the militants’ momentum.
Neighboring Iran, which along with Washington had backed Maliki, is working diplomatically to try to find a less polarizing figure who can unite Iraq’s sectarian factions. Tehran has also sent elite Revolutionary Guard officers to help organize the defense of Baghdad, Iranian sources say.
Obama sent a small number of U.S. military advisers in June in an effort to help the Iraqi government’s efforts to fend off the Islamist offensive.
Pope Francis named a special representative for Iraq “in light of the grave situation”. Many of the fleeing Iraqi Christians are Chaldean Catholics in communion with the pope.
Additional reporting from Isabel Coles in Arbil and Michael Georgy in Baghdad and Michael Shields in Vienna; Writing by Paul Taylor and Peter Graff, editing by Peter Millership
© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.
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